Teen asks himself to prom with a flashmob, flowers, and banner

In 2018, a flashmob performance in a high school courtyard is just one of the over-the-top way teens ask one another to prom. Jonathan Kha, a 16-year student at James Logan High School in Union City, Calif., wanted a spectacle for his own promposal. So he planned a flashmob, designed a banner, and bought flowers.

The difference? Kha put in all that hard work to ask himself to prom.

“Nobody wanted to ask me to prom … so I asked myself,” he wrote on Twitter to accompany a video of the promposal. In the clip, Kha walks down an aisle surrounded by cheering classmates to Bruno Mars singing, “You’re amazing just the way you are.” A friend holds up a mirror, and Kha accepts a date offer from his own reflection.

The video is going viral on Twitter, and Kha’s meticulous planning is just one reason why. As one fan responded, “this newer generation is on a whole nother level man.” Another agreed, “I wanna go back to high school just so I can do this myself.”

The video is joyful and energetic, and for Kha, taking himself to prom wasn’t a consolation prize. He only wanted to impress one person: himself.

“I knew that if I were to ever do a promposal, I’d want it to be special,” Kha tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “In the midst of looking for a prom date, I thought to myself, ‘Why not just ask myself?’ It was a crazy idea at first, but I thought to myself that it would’ve been something funny and entertaining for people to witness. I decided to ask some of my friends if they were interested in being part of a promposal, and all of it took off from there.”

Kha drew his inspiration from “Twitter and other platforms,” but he isn’t the first to pull off an elaborate ruse all for a solo date. In 2017, Lily Bilgrey of Freehold Township, N.J., asked herself to prom with a poster that read “You can’t spell memes without me. Prom?”

At the time, Bilgrey told Todaythat “I didn’t want to miss the experience of getting an elaborate promposal, so I promposed to myself!”

As promposals grow more elaborate, it’s easy to imagine that the pressure to make (or receive) a public declaration is mounting in high schools. But creative thinkers like Kha can find some breathing room inside the pressure. As he wrote on Twitter, “I did the promposal just for the fun of it. Just some positivity and self-love here and there. Nothing serious.”